Fooling around with waterfowl

In our ongoing quest to do every possible fun activity in North Carolina, yesterday I signed us up to visit the Sylvan Heights Waterfowl Park in Scotland Neck a couple hours away. When I told a friend about it I described it something like this: "We're going to drive two hours to see a bunch of ducks and geese." Luckily Roger just likes being with the family, so he was game (er, fowl?) for anything.

To get to the Park you have to drive miles (and miles and miles) through cottonfields in the poorest county of North Carolina. Seriously, this area was jaw-dropping poor. And it didn't help that debris from the last hurricane formed little mountains on the roadside. So my hopes were not high that this would be anything other than a small pond with a few lackluster ducks.

Well, color me surprised! Before I could even buy the tickets Catherine was holding an hours-old Abyssinian Blue-Winged Goose chick (native to Africa), and Roger was deep in conversation with the lady who built the center with her husband. Turns out they opened the breeding facility next door, in part to rebuild declining waterfowl populations, and the animal world was so impressed that the zoo association gave them a grant to build this world-class facility for visitors. And boy, was it ever world-class. There were so many exotic ducks, geese, cranes, and swans (and birds, too -- toucans, parrots, hornbills, rainbow lorikeets, pheasants, turkeys, kookaburras) that after a while there was a sense of, Oh, another roseate spoonbill... yawn.

The waterfowl populations are divided by continent (South America = colorful, Australia = wacky!), but there are also habitats set aside for endangered populations. The Park has one of the last surviving herds of White-winged Wood Ducks, whose primary breeding ground was destroyed by the 2004 Indonesian tsunami. We saw an emu, watched a toucan snap up grapes, fed Victorian-Crowned Pigeons, almost got bit by a flamingo, screamed at an attacking bird in the African section (there was good reason this guy had his own cage!) and marveled at the fact that there is such beautiful variety in birds and waterfowl. And of course we stood outside the kookaburra habitat and sang the kookaburra song. He didn't laugh.

At the end we bought each child a small stuffed bird that is supposed to make its real call. Catherine selected a robotic-sounding mourning dove she named Vanessa and Vincent chose Woody the Red-Headed Woodpecker (who for some reason slept in the oven of their play kitchen last night). And by consensus, we chose for Dominic a wild turkey.